Computing devices have made significant contributions toward the advancement of modern society and are utilized in a number of applications to achieve advantageous results. Numerous devices, such as personal computers, laptop computers, tablet computers, smart phones and the like are directed toward specific markets and applications. For example, there are relatively large desktop personal computers for use in home and office. The desktop PCs are generally able to operate with a large number of external peripheral devices, such as monitors, keyboards, pointing devices, printers, cameras, speakers and the like. Desktop PCs are generally adapted to be readily expanded and/or upgraded. Laptop computers, tablet computers and smart phones provide increasing portability but generally are adapted to support fewer external peripheral devices, particularly at any given time and it generally is more difficult to upgrade or expand the devices.
Most conventional computing devices include a plurality of ports for communicating with one or more peripheral device and/or one or more other devices. For example, a conventional laptop computer may include an HDMI port, a DVI port, a plurality of USB ports, an Ethernet port, a WIFI transceiver, and/or the like. A conventional tablet computer may include one HDMI port, one USB port, a WIFI transceiver and/or the like. Typically, the smaller the form fact of the computing device, the less communication ports are included.
Usually one or more peripherals such as a keyboard, a pointing device, speakers, a camera, a storage device and the like are coupled to the computing device through the USB port of the computing device. At times the operation of the computing device or between the computing device and one or more USB coupled peripheral device, and/or software running on the computing device or USB peripheral may experience problems. In a conventional computing device having a plurality of USB ports, one of the ports may be used to debug the problem. In such case, one USB port can be used for normal USB operations while a debug platform can be coupled to another USB port for debugging the software or hardware of the computing device.